Mental Illness and Criminality

This evening I watched a TV news report on James Holmes, the suspected Batman killer, and how he went from a geeky but basically normal teenager to the zomboid freak that showed up in court today. The reporter said everyone who knew Holmes back then is wondering now what happened to him over the years. Me, I thought of my friend Z.

Z. is in his late twenties. He is smart, kind, quirky, and fun to be around. That’s how I remember him. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years. He called me one night some months back from his city, and told me he had had a run-in with police. They found him naked atop a tree. He said he fell out of the tree, and was arrested in the hospital after he came to.

Z. told me he had been smoking “synthetic marijuana,” a legal (in his state, at the time at least) product that has been known to produce psychotic episodes in some people. It did him. He talked as if it were just one more kooky episode in his life.

I didn’t hear from him for a while. Then a mutual friend got in touch to tell me that Z. was in a psychiatric hospital. He had been using the drug again, and was arrested after having another psychotic episode in public. Doctors were saying that the drug can release underlying psychoses — that is, make people who have latent psychosis go active with severe mental illness.

Z. was released from the hospital after 10 days, and given medication. He lost his job, however, and refused to take his medication. The last time I heard from him was about two months ago, when he contacted me to ask permission to come visit while on a roadtrip. I told him no, he couldn’t, and that he should go back home, start taking his medication, and work to make things right with the people he hurt and offended by his behavior. He said he would.

What he did was go home and start living on the streets of his city, record his videos on an iPhone, and upload them to the Internet. He’s officially homeless, and lives in a shelter. It’s heartbreaking to see the video of this brilliant, sweet, fun young man. He’s fried his brain, he won’t get help, and nobody apparently can compel him to get help. He went from having a demanding but worthwhile job, beloved by most everyone, to a mental case living on the streets — all in the past year. Just like that.

It happens. I wonder if James Holmes ever experimented with synthetic marijuana…

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57 Responses to Mental Illness and Criminality

And really, how is saying that the Bible has been the basis for much evil in the world trite, whereas saying “I believe in the Bible” is not? It’s a serious matter, and something no serious Christian can avoid confronting.

Mary Russell, I’m curious to know what this means: “Acute infusions of delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol have provoked psychotic- type symptoms in people with and without schizophrenia, providing further evidence of cannabis as a risk factor for psychosis.” Does that mean in a lab situation, people who are given pure THC have psychotic-like reactions? Because that is well known. There are a number of substances in cannabis that lead to the high, and THC is only one. Without some of the other cannibinols, THC does indeed induce extreme paranoia. Sorry, I don’t know the exact details. Since I quit smoking pot (not for any reason other than I wasn’t enjoying it very much any more), I don’t do as much research as I used to on it’s effects. I also realize, I’m speaking to an empty thread at this point.

The antisemitism in the world today draws far more on events within living memory than on any ancient book of a Christian religion quite impotent in the world today.

And even so, persecution against Christians has from the beginning been fully as violent and ugly as any of that committed by professing Christians.

For those who care to stay in the times, greater cause for concern might be seen in the enthusistic advocating of some to have religious beliefs of long tradition equated now with psychosis. Pretty creepy.

Church Lady,
I thought we were talking about the Nazis, not rehashing the entire history of Jewish-Gentile relations.
But if that’s where you want to go, you should know that anti-Semitism did not originate with Christianity. It’s even older. The dust had not yet started to gather on Alexander’s golden coffin before there were anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria. And Antiochos Epiphanes was not a Christian monarch. It was the Greeks (and to a lesser extent the Romans) who imported their own dislike of the Jews, ironically, into a Jewish-sourced religion.

It seemed a bit contrived that even a mass murder would call himself the Joker at a Batman movie premier, especially a brilliant neuroscience major working towards his Ph.D. Now, I know that the man with the orange dyed hair is not the dark haired man with the frightening smile. See for yourselves.

I demand proof that the man being tried in Denver is really James Egan Holmes, and I know how disprove it. Even if there is no profile shot of the real Holmes and no finger prints, and handwriting analysis is disallowed, there are still foot prints on his hospital birth certificate. Or, has that been conveniently lost? If so, paper leaves finger prints. I read that in The Riddle of Anna Anderson, by Peter Kurth.